As avid readers of this blog (and anyone who reads this sentence) know, I recently taught a week-long program for high-school-age students that included some Heroscape.

I'll be doing the same next year, and canvassing here once the details are available, but for now here's the start of the wrap-up page from this summer just gone. I don't know if it'll get expanded, but 'scape gets top billing (assuming that first photo means top billing).

I haven't been around much recently, but I still pop in from time-to-time. And this seemed like it was worth sharing as a whole bunch of you are, I suspect, in the right demographic.

This summer I'll be teaching a one week course for 15-19 year olds on puzzles. You should come, it'll be fun. We can play Heroscape. Rash promise: if a bunch of Heroscapers come I'll put it in the syllabus (it's not that much of a stretch).

Details here. The other programs will be almost () as awesome. You should check those out too.

This post is a follow up to some discussion in the comments to my last blog post, A Neg Rep Rampage. I've made similar points elsewhere I'm sure, but a blog rant seemed like a good idea. You might disagree.

The subject is automatic spelling checker programs, the ones that give you red wiggly lines or whatever to tell you that something is up as you are typing.

Short version: I don't like them.

Long version...

At best, I see this sort of assistance as akin to stabilisers on a bike. Great to get you started and give you a feel for what cycling/writing is like, but not something to keep on indefinitely. If you have a prompt that tells you each time you do something wrong (probably, more on this below), how are you going to learn to write well yourself?

This is not to say that you should not scrutinise your writing for errors. Quite the opposite. My theory is that by relying on someone (or something) else to...

I've been hanging around on the site quite a bit less recently. It hasn't been a deliberate decision, I've just been keener to ramble through other regions of the internet. The obvious explanation is the cancellation of the game, but I don't think that's it. One of the great things about this site is (or was, which is my point) that people posted as if they cared about expressing themselves clearly, following basic grammatical and spelling conventions.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that this is not the case any more. At least, I often find myself wading through a misspelt mess with random-seeming punctuation. And I don't enjoy doing that.

As I understand it, the point of negrep is to say "this post made my experience of heroscapers.com worse rather than better". This fits the bill for these posts exactly, so I'm going to start negrepping them. Indeed, the point of...